Brand New, Infected Hard Drives

Maxtor hard drives sold in Taiwan came out of the box with malicious software, according to Seagate, which owns the Maxtor line. The virus was found by Kaspersky, which identifies it as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah. This virus searches for passwords to online...

The virus was found by Kaspersky, which identifies it as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah. This virus searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other similar viruses and can disable virus detection software. The following games (all Chinese except for World of Warcraft) are affected.

WSGame

91.com

QQ

Woool

rxjh.17game.com

TianLongBaBu

AskTao

Perfect World (Wanmei Shijie)

World of Warcraft

The company says they quickly traced the problem to a subcontractor in China and added: "All units now leaving the facility in question have been cleared of the virus and units in inventory are being reworked before being released for sale." Somewhat surprising that they are still using the subcontractor; personally I'd fire them, but that's just me.

Note that this is an external hard drive, and if you were to plug it in to your system via USB the virus would likely run through the autorun facility. This is good reason to disable Autorun and to have antivirus software installed on your system, and kept up to date.